Abbott vs. Burke's about as dead as Dracula

We now know what Gov. Jon Corzine is doing about his own property taxes. But we still don't know what he'll be doing about ours.

We learned in the Sunday Star-Ledger's Auditor column that Corzine has acquired a luxury condo on the Hoboken waterfront. So far this year he has paid property taxes of about $7,300 on a pad that cost more than $3 million.

That's relatively cheap by Jersey standards. And one reason it's cheap is that Hoboken gets extra state aid because it is an Abbott school district.

Or should I say "was" an Abbott school district? Last week the state Supreme Court issued a decision many took to mean the end of the long-running Abbott school-funding case. That's the case in which 31 "poor" school districts receive massive amounts of state aid paid out of the income taxes from the rest of us.

I put the word "poor" in quotes because many of those districts are not poor in any sense, though reporters continually mischaracterize them as such. Hoboken is among the wealthiest square miles of land on Earth. Adjacent areas of Jersey City don't lag far behind. And when it comes to luxury waterfront condos, Long Branch may have the most on the coast.

Yet all are Abbott districts. So an end to Abbott is long overdue. And when the Corzine crowd boasted that the court had declared an end to Abbott, many journalists who should have known better were taken in.

Not me. I recall the first "end" to Abbott. That was in 1998. The governor was another extremely wealthy politician who didn't seem to give a damn about the property taxes paid by the rest of us. Christie Whitman offered the court all sorts of expensive inducements to end the Abbott case. The districts would get preschool education as well as $6 billion or so worth of new buildings. The state would pay every cent.

That satisfied the supremes - or so Whitman thought.

"It's time to not only end the chapter but close the book," said her attorney general, Peter Verniero, as he declared the Abbott vs. Burke case completed following that ruling.

Verniero's optimism was premature, as he found out after Whitman appointed him to the high court, which kept hearing various Abbott complaints long after she was out of office. Yesterday I spoke to Verniero, who is now in private practice in Newark.

"Is it over?" he asked. "I think it's premature to say the Abbott case is over."

One reason is that the court has retained the power to come back and review the state's new funding scheme in three years. But another reason, said Verniero, is simple: "Everyone knows where the court is. Everyone knows the courthouse address."

The "everyone" in question includes the Education Law Center, the Newark-based group that pursues the Abbott litigation. The ELC is funded by, among others, the IOLTA. As the initials suggest, the IOLTA gets its money from "interest on lawyer's trust accounts." And the IOLTA was set up by - you guessed it - the state Supreme Court.

"They shouldn't get a nickel," says Assemblyman Mike Carroll of Morris County. "It should be illegal to give public money to somebody who spends their time raping the taxpayer."

As you can tell from that quote, Carroll is a fire-breathing conservative. But he's also a Morris County taxpayer. And if you understand how Morris has fared under Abbott, you can see why those flames are coming out of his mouth.

The state spends more than $5.8 million a year providing free preschool in Hoboken. That's more state aid than most school districts in Morris County get to run their entire K-12 programs. The West Morris Regional School District, which represents five towns, doesn't get as much to run its high schools as Hoboken gets for a glorified day-care program.

But imagine for a second that, in a burst of charity, the governor decided that he should pay the cost of preschool in his home town through his property taxes. The minute Corzine cut off state aid to Hoboken, the Education Law Center would be back in court. And Abbott would live again.

It never really died. Corzine's new funding formula varies only slightly from the old formula. Meanwhile his leading Republican opponent, Chris Christie, has praised the court decision and has offered no property-tax relief plan of his own.

So the Abbott approach is no more dead than a vampire resting in its coffin. If we're ever going to get property-tax relief in this state, someone is going to have to drive a wooden stake through its heart some day. But if the polls are correct, that day will not be today.